As the NATO Alliance enters its seventh decade, it finds itself involved in an array of military missions ranging from Afghanistan to Kosovo to Sudan. It also stands at the center of a host of regional and global partnerships. Yet, NATO has still to articulate a grand strategic vision designed to determine how, when, and where its capabilities should be used, the values underpinning its new missions, and its relationship to other international actors such as the European Union and the United Nations. The drafting of a new strategic concept, begun during NATOÆs 60th anniversary summit, presents an opportunity to shape a new transatlantic vision that is anchored in the liberal democratic principles so crucial to NATOÆs successes during its Cold War years. Furthermore, that vision should be focused on equipping the Alliance to anticipate and address the increasingly global and less predictable threats of the post-9/11 world.This volume brings together scholars and policy experts from both sides of the Atlantic to examine the key issues that NATO must address in formulating a new strategic vision. With thoughtful and reasoned analysis, it offers both an assessment of NATOÆs recent evolution and an analysis of where the Alliance must go if it is to remain relevant in the twenty-first century.

This timely collection of essays comes out as NATO enters its seventh decade, asking itself, as it has done for much of its existence, how to adapt to ensure a useful future. The questions are almost as old as the Alliance. What changes is the context.

I recall my very first “whither NATO” conference, which I attended while a research student at Oxford in early 1974. This was a time when the U.S. and U.K. governments had been enfeebled by internal political developments and were facing “stagflation” as high energy prices triggered both inflation and recession. There was a deep...

As the north atlantic treaty organization, NATO, enters its seventh decade, it finds itself busier than at any time in its history. Not only is the Alliance involved in an array of military missions, widely ranging in scope and geographical area from Afghanistan to Sudan; NATO also stands at the center of a host of regional and global partnerships now increasingly focused on equipping it to address the new global challenges that it confronts in the post–Cold War, post–September 11, 2001, world. Yet despite NATO’s wider engagement in these global missions and partnerships, it remains troubled by the...

For several decades, NATO has represented something of a paradox: An Alliance that is generally seen as being permanently in crisis reaches yet another milestone of longevity. Twenty years have passed since the Berlin Wall came down and a Soviet analyst, Giorgy Arbatov, famously jibed that the Soviet Union had dealt NATO a death blow by taking away its enemy. On the contrary, the Alliance has been enlarged, become globalized, and become involved in more activities in more parts of the world than its founding fathers could ever have envisioned. At NATO’s Summit in April 2009 in Strasbourg-Kehl, its leaders...

Since the inception of its Strategic Concept of 1991 and the revised version of 1999, NATO’s post–Cold War role has been largely driven by its missions and less so by a grand strategy. This chapter explains what a grand strategy is and how NATO, in the early post–Cold War era, had the relatively comfortable task of being part of a grand strategy of the wider “Western security community,” which incorporated not only NATO but also the European Union and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.¹

Nato’s secretary-general, the Alliance’s civilian political leader, is one organizational facet of its evolution that has received considerably less scrutiny than many other elements of its past and ongoing transformations. Although some historians have begun to give increased attention to the roles played by NATO’s Cold War secretaries-general and military leaders, major research gaps remain regarding the roles these individuals play in shaping the Alliance’s strategy. As NATO continues to evolve and develop new Strategic Concepts, it is useful to consider the extent to which NATO’s secretary-general shapes and influences its strategic vision.

Like many organizations involved in complex missions in recent years, NATO has been rethinking the balance between its military and nonmilitary instruments. It has learned important lessons in difficult operations such as Afghanistan and Kosovo, and (albeit largely outside the NATO framework) in Iraq. The conceptual basis of this effort is NATO’s Comprehensive Approach, which seeks to make closer cooperation among civilian and military responses an integral part of Alliance operations. Developing a coherent and relevant approach to this complicated problem is now at the forefront of the major challenges facing the Alliance today.

The focus of this chapter is on the structures of the NATO–Russia relationship, and the key questions considered here have to do with how this relationship has developed, why it is important, and where it may be going. Russia matters to NATO as its most “significant other” in the broader European context. As such, developing and maintaining at least a tolerably functioning relationship with Russia has come to be seen as an important element underpinning NATO’s claims to legitimacy as a core component of the post–Cold War European security architecture. Over time, NATO’s members have also come to...

As nato moves to implement a new Strategic Concept for twenty-first-century security challenges, it will need to continue to manage effectively its relationship with Russia. New threats, particularly the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and associated missile delivery technology, can only be managed effectively with the full and constructive engagement of Russia. As the first decade of the twenty-first century drew to a close, the problem of Iran and its nuclear ambitions had become particularly acute. By 2008, NATO’s members were in fragile agreement that ballistic missile defense might be an important component of collective defense and thus central...

CHAPTER 7
The “New” Members and Future Enlargement:
THE IMPACT OF NATO–RUSSIA RELATIONS
(pp. 153-174)

Roger E. Kanet

Although nato has tried to retain its momentum of transformation and relevance in an ever-changing world, the new strategic environment in Europe poses an essential dilemma for the normative basis of NATO’s continuity given its 1990s template. Recent events in the Caucasus and the crisis over Russia’s August 2008 intervention in Georgia and its subsequent recognition of the breakaway Georgian republics of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, followed by NATO’s condemnation of Russia’s behavior, have created a dilemma for the West in dealing with the growing discrepancy between the realpolitik of regional geopolitics and the expansionary nature of a global...

One of the areas where a vision of NATO’s transformation has been clearly articulated is its enlargement. Even if the initial phases of the enlargement debate showed some uncertainties and a number of differing views,¹ the initial tone had already been set by President George H. W. Bush’s famous remark, in 1989, that the time had come for Europe to be “whole and free” and that this was “the new mission of NATO.”² The vision underpinning enlargement was therefore quite clear: NATO was to extend its “security umbrella” to the rest of the continent, for the purpose of creating stability....

CHAPTER 9
The Future of the Alliance:
IS DEMOGRAPHY DESTINY?
(pp. 201-218)

Jeffrey Simon

As nato begins the process of drafting its new Strategic Concept, its members should consider that not only is their strategic environment changing dramatically but demographic factors in both the United States and Europe also have the potential to alter the shared identity that has underpinned the Alliance since its inception in 1949. These same factors are also likely to affect NATO’s capacity to provide for the collective defense of its members. Indeed, the number of Europeans in the military—already diminished greatly since the end of the Cold War—will continue to shrink in future years because of social,...

CHAPTER 10
Partnership Goes Global:
THE ROLE OF NONMEMBER, NON–EUROPEAN UNION STATES IN THE EVOLUTION OF NATO
(pp. 219-242)

Rebecca R. Moore

Discussions of nato’s new global orientation often focus on its post–September 11, 2001, military missions in Afghanistan, Iraq, Darfur, the Mediterranean, and even Pakistan. Evidence of an increasingly global, less Eurocentric perspective, however, can also be found in the creation of NATO’s new partnerships, which now extend well beyond the borders of Europe. These partnerships—including the Partnership for Peace, Euro-Atlantic Partnership Council, NATO–Russia Council, NATO–Ukraine Commission, NATO– Georgia Commission, Mediterranean Dialogue, and Istanbul Cooperation Initiative, along with less formal relationships with non-European allies or “global partners”—constitute one of the principal mechanisms through which NATO has...

In its seventh decade, NATO is faced with a plethora of challenges and the need to forge a common vision to tackle them. As Jamie Shea points out in chapter 1, however, it has been the crises in NATO’s history that have led its members to forge consensuses. Perhaps the challenges that have been explored in this book, from managing relations with Russia to succeeding in Afghanistan, can assist NATO’s member states in forging a much-needed new consensus. Such a consensus must encompass not only a grand strategic vision but also a common threat assessment that goes beyond a lowest...